Mäki, Uskali, Models and the Locus of Their Truth

authors

Mäki, Uskali

url

http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11229-009-9566-0

Models violate “the whole truth” in that they leave much out and cover so little: models isolate. They also violate “nothing but the truth” due to containing assumptions that distort the properties of things in the world: models idealize.

[..] there is no necessary conflict between a model being true and that model violating the whole truth and nothing but the truth in the way described above. I accept the weaker idea that a model may be true despite false assumptions. I also accept—and argue for in this paper—the stronger idea that a model may help capture truths thanks to false assumptions. Thus, many truths are attainable without de-isolation by de-idealization—and indeed are attainable in virtue of isolation by idealization.

An example is Giere’s (1988) view that models are not truth-valued because they are not linguistic entities (but are rather “abstract objects”).

Naively, bull. I expect to find reference class shenanigans, possibly steelmannable into something that falls out of JL Austin-esque or Searle-esque thinking about utterance modes.

Maki cares about truth actually existing and explores its relationship to models beginning with the idea that they are associated with it at all. He's like, this isn't a rhetorical game! There is a real thing we are doing here! It winds up being an interesting account of the process of thinking with models. The central idea is the functional decomposition of models.

He looks at models as:

• isolations

  • feels like a recapitulation of the concept of a thought experiment. yes, bruh, fiction is useful for recovering implicit knowledge. I call this the building of a newtonian model, don't remember where I picked it up.

  • nice example, though. a clear concrete illustration of the principle behind "ceteris paribus", which is I think the exact point he's trying to make - that "ceteris paribus" is a type of thought experiment.

  • He looks at the same example in Mäki

  • the progressive relaxation of the unreal constraints, and observing the resulting deviations, makes this look like perturbation theory. He also points this out, calling it an argument by "first approximation".

  • does this adequately address experiment poverty? Not at all, actually.

• representations

  • does it look like it?

  • does it run like it?

  • does it look and run like it to the intended audience?

  • does it look and run like it to a point?

  • does it move the conversation forward? Are there handles of resemblance, causal resemblance, and deviation, that prompt further questions?

    • this is where you want the model to decompose into subformulae one way more than another way. Some constructions provide better handles in the variation.

  • this is a rubric not a constraint list. he ediotirally emphasises that mere resemblance of a model to its domain is not that important on balance.

    • is he just reinventing functional abstraction? I think so sigh

• truth containers

  • single turnstile is valid, approximate double turnstile is valid

  • arrows not nodes please

  • rhetorical engagement is a necessary part of verification

  • okay we're done

I continue to have a bone to pick with this man's cope and seethe around McCloskey, because it looks like he's just reconstructing the idea that rhetoric is inextricable from practice, and completely dodging the nuances of why.